LOS ANGELES —This city makes me feel as if everything there every could be to do has been done. And the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a museum the enthrones the first artist to throw away the rule book about what can and cannot be done. What I've learned (from art history classes at a prestigious university) to call Modern Art is work from after 1900, that has no more clear purpose than a human being. At this time, art stopped being solely about beauty and had an intellectual component.

LACMA (pronounced Lack'-ma) devotes huge galleries to this modernist work, more space than the top floor of the Pompidou Center in Paris, which is the French show work of and since Henri Matisse. LACMA has the box of miniatures Marcel Duchamp made of all his important pieces, they have very funky Picasso sculpture ... you want to see it, and they have something.

This year, the museum built an entirely new building to house contemporary art, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, designed by architect Renzo Piano.

Terry Talty is an Art Tourist, traveling to see art exhibitions as if they are the new Seven Wonders of the World.